Aidan:On a more serious note, this is actually what I've been arguing that we should be doing; throw some animals up into space, see what happens. They're cheap and expendable (although clearly dogs and cats have that whole cuteness thing going for them), and we could learn tons more than we're learning by very carefully sending humans up every 2 months to very carefully not do anything too crazy.

The Russians have been doing exactly that since the early days of space flight. These are just the latest animals they've launched into space. Even with humans they've done more research than anyone else, and their cosmonauts hold several records.

They'd just grab stray dogs off the street and kill them in centrifuges, fire them into the high atmosphere inside rockets, or launch them into space to see how fast radiation killed them.

"...all fish onboard German-sponsored Omegahab experiment died as a result of the technical failure in the aquarium. ...a single failure in the experiment containing gerbils (Kontur-BM) led the flight control system to turn off power to the entire unit interrupting oxygen and food supply, light and ventilation.

In the experiment containing mice, the food-supply system failed immediately (after launch) leading to the loss of 15 mice. Other technical failures in various units of the experiment left only six out of 45 mice onboard Bion-M N. 1 alive (by the end of the flight), The natural death of the animals was not expected to exceed five percent of the population, according to Il'in. He confirmed that all 15 geckos, snails and microorganisms did survive the flight."